Mother Jones Quotes

Child labor and poverty are inevitably bound together and if you continue to use the labor of children as the treatment for the social disease of poverty, you will have both poverty and child labor to the end of time.

The present miner has had his day; he has been oppressed and ground down and denied the right to live as a human being; but there is another generation coming up, a generation of little children prematurely doomed to the whirl of the mill and the soot and the noise and the blackness of the breaker. It is for them that we are fighting.

Those who produce should have, but we know that those who produce the most - that is, those who work hardest, and at the most difficult and most menial tasks, have the least.

Little girls and boys, barefooted, walked up and down between the endless rows of spindles, reaching thin little hands into the machinery to repair snapped threads.

In Georgia where children work day and night in the cotton mills they have just passed a bill to protect song birds. What about the little children from whom all song is gone?

No family should have to depend on the labor of its children to put food on the table and no person should be forced to work in captivity.

Twenty thousand textile workers in Lawrence had walked out against a wage cut. It was a sudden, unplanned uprising. A fifty-four-hour week for women and children had been put into effect in Massachusetts, and the textile industry employed so many women and children that it meant a fifty-four-hour week for everyone. Consequently, there was a wage cut. It was a small cut, but it meant "four loaves of bread" to the workers.

It Is Not Linen You're Wearing Out But Human Creatures' Lives.

Solidarity forever …. We stand outcast and starving from the wonders we have made.

Oppress not a hired servant ... whether he be of thy brethren or of thy strangers in the land.

The Moral and Physical Condition of the Working Classes Employed in the Cotton Manufacture in Manchester

The industrial revolution caused unspeakable misery both in England and in America … In the Lancashire cotton mills (from which Marx and Engels derived their livelihood), children worked from 12 to 16 hours a day; they often began working at the age of six or seven. Children had to be beaten to keep them from falling asleep while at work; in spite of this, many failed to keep awake and were mutilated or killed. Parents had to submit to the infliction of these atrocities upon their children, because they themselves were in a desperate plight. Craftsmen had been thrown out of work by the machines; rural labourers were compelled to migrate to the towns by the Enclosure Acts, which used Parliament to make landowners richer by making peasants destitute; trade unions were illegal until 1824; the government employed agents provocateurs to try to get revolutionary sentiments out of wage-earners, who were then deported or hanged. Such was the first effect of machinery in England.

The working classes may be injuriously degraded and oppressed in three ways: 1st — When they are neglected in infancy. 2nd — When they are overworked by their employer, and are thus rendered incompetent from ignorance to make a good use of high wages when they can procure them. 3rd — When they are paid low wages for their labor

The clothes make the man. The children working in sweatshops make the clothes. Therefore, the children working in sweatshops make the man.

I understand that if you're a kid in Indonesia, you need to smoke because you just got off work at the Nike factory.

When someone works for less pay than she can live on - when, for example, she goes hungry so that you can eat more cheaply and conveniently - then she has made a great sacrifice for you, she has made you a gift of some part of her abilities, her health, and her life.

The men in the steel industry who sacrificed their all were nor merely aiding their fellows at home but were adding strength to the cause of their comrades in all industry.

Conditions in Chinese factories are harsh. They're much harsher than they are in, for instance, the United States or any Western nation.

There are children who are working in textile businesses in Asia who would be prostitutes on the streets if they did not have those jobs.

Journalists were at the forefront. From the Civil War until the early 1900s, nothing was being done to solve the problems of the Industrial Age.

I started working when I was 9 or 10.

We will make slavery history very soon. We will make child labor history very soon.

Economic growth will not stop slavery, at least not anytime soon.

We were no experts in the field of labor organization, but we had something in common with our fellow workers -- we were all poor -- we were all overworked -- we were all victims of the 84 hour week. In fact, we were all so low down on the economic and social ladder that we had nowhere to go but up

He would not blow his nose without moralizing on conditions in the handkerchief industry.